William Deresiewicz Read online

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  fluctuations trace the moment-by-moment reactions of the poet’s mind (in Critical Essays on Lord Byron, ed. Robert F. Gleckner [New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991], pp. 3336). 60. As Know-Shaw notes, “Elinor’s feelings are mediated to the reader through the measured language of the narrator, or frequently through a reflective kind of self-report” (“Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” p. 53). 61. According to Kroeber, all six canonical Romantic poets “tended to regard thought as constituted of emotions” (Ecological Literary Criticism, p. 5). 62. Mary Poovey, as I mentioned above, does indeed see the late novels as insisting more on the claims of desire (see note 5). Know-Shaw, citing Thomas Lockwood, argues that “there is truth in his contention that Jane Austen exposes the chasm that separates reason from the life of feeling in Persuasion, setting their respective claims at jar” (“Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” p. 53). 63. Fanny must surrender her desires in nearly every other respect, as I will discuss in detail in my chapter on Mansfield Park, but that she must do so is presented as a deplorable consequence of the nature of the novel’s social world, not as something endorsed by Austen as ethically desirable. As for Emma, it is not her feelings that are wrong, but her imagination; if anything, as Trilling notes, her feelings tend to set her right after she has seen what her imagination has led her into (“Emma,” p. 55). And as for her desires—again, it is a matter of discovering what they are rather than what they ought to be. 64. Roger Sales notes that all three novels have unresolved endings (Jane Austen and the Representation of Regency England [London: Routledge, 1994], p. xxi). For discussions of individual novels, see below. For the view that all six of the novels resist closure, see Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture (2nd ed.; Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 130134, who argue that all of them call into question any one construction of reality by characters or author; Robin Grove, “Austen’s Ambiguous Conclusions,” in Jane Austen, ed. Bloom, pp. 179190, who claims that, contrary to popular opinion, Austen never takes clear moral positions, that her endings are always qualified or ironic or selfconscious; and also, of course, D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 3106. 65. None of the early novels exhibits any of these forms of resistance to closure, with one obvious exception. The forced marriage of Marianne to Brandon at the end of Sense and Sensibility arouses as much readerly dissatisfaction as does the marriage of Fanny to Edmund. But by the same token it serves to point out the difference between the early and late works. While the late Austen goes out of her way to incite questions about the ending of Mansfield Park, as we will soon see, the younger one does her best to shove the ending of Sense and Sensibility down our throats. Austen deliberately designed Mansfield Park to create interpretive indeterminacy, but Sense and Sensibility, her weakest novel in quite a number of ways, simply seems to have gotten away from her. The moral implicit in its ending—and none of her other novels comes close to being as didactic—is at odds with the readerly emotions and desires that had been aroused up to that point. To use terms I developed in the previous chapter, while Austen loved Marianne, she only esteemed Elinor, and so while the novel quite effectively makes us love Marianne as well,

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  makes us wish to see her as happy at the end of the novel as she had once been with Willoughby, it does not move us to assent to the triumph of Elinor’s way of being in the world. Our minds may be convinced, but our hearts aren’t persuaded—just as is the case with Marianne herself. (For a different discussion of the problem of closure in the novel, see Laura Mooneyham White, “Jane Austen and the Marriage Plot: Questions of Persistence,” in Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, pp. 7778.) 66. Trilling, “Emma,” p. 51. 67. Along these lines, Claudia L. Johnson argues that Emma is “not fully contained within the grid imposed by the courtship plot” (Equivocal Beings [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], p. 195; emphasis in the original), while Brown notes that Emma’s dialectical relationships—with herself, with Knightley, and with Highbury—never move to “the death of total resolution” (p. 106). 68. A feeling so widespread in the critical literature as to make particular citation arbitrary. Even George Levine, who believes the novel to be teleological, acknowledges that the ironies of the happy ending represent a tug against telos (Darwin and the Novelists [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989], p. 69), while Ruth Bernard Yeazell suggests that even Fanny’s final happiness is meant to be taken ironically, as a “fiction” (Fictions of Modesty [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], p. 168). 69. We find the same apparent ambivalence and same rare appearance of the firstperson pronoun in another passage that bespeaks the possibility of Fanny’s ultimate attachment to Henry. Mortified at running into her vulgar father on their walk through Portsmouth, Fanny laments that Henry will undoubtedly “soon give her up, and cease to have the smallest inclination for the match; and yet, though she had been so much wanting his affection to be cured, this was a sort of cure that would be almost as bad as the complaint; and I believe, there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations” (p. 333). 70. For an extensive discussion of this negativity, see Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, pp. 127150. 71. Swingle, though arguing that this famous final phrase should be taken without irony, sees the ending as “a sort of miracle”: “We see a fragile construct, which our sense of the laws of life (at least the novel’s laws of life) tells us should not be able to exist, but it is existing” (“Perfect Happiness of the Union,” p. 318). 72. For other discussions of the notion of perfection in Emma, see Joseph Litvak, “Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text in Emma,” in Jane Austen’s Emma, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 134, and Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen, p. 241. 73. Letters, p. 335 (23 March 1817). 74. Ruoff makes this point about Mansfield Park (“Sense of a Beginning,” pp. 184185).

  chapter 3 : Mansfield Park: Substitution

  1. For other discussions of this scene, see Barbara Hardy, “Properties and Possessions in Jane Austen’s Novels,” in Jane Austen’s Achievement, ed. Juliet McMaster (London:

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  Macmillan, 1976), p. 96, and “The Objects in Mansfield Park,” in Bicentenary Essays, pp. 185187, where she notes that Fanny “is qualified for brooding by the powers of memory, like the hero of Wordsworth’s Prelude” (p. 86); Galperin, “What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?,” p. 380; David Monaghan, “Structure and Social Vision,” in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, who calls the transparencies “Romantic” (p. 91) and sees them as “an emblem of [Fanny’s] private world” (p. 92); Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, pp. 7374, who regards Fanny’s retreat to her room as a “strategic withdrawal of the moral self from the corruption of its environment” and “a search inwards for a purity of moral intention”; Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen, p. 200; and Litz, “Forms of Estrangement,” p. 226, who sees Fanny’s transparencies as a Wordsworthian reference but argues that they illustrate differences between novelist and poet. Most relevantly, Clayton sees the East room as being like an embodiment of Keats’s “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” the stage of life that Keats himself identifies with “Tintern Abbey.” “The room is in fact a microcosm of consciousness, and a retreat to her room is equivalent to a retreat into herself,” Clayton says, going on to point out the presence in the room of the Tintern Abbey transparency (Romantic Vision and the Novel, p. 68). 2. Carl Woodring cites Arthur Beatty as noting that the three life-stages of Wordsworth’s poem correspond to Hartley’s mideighteenth-century classification (Wordsworth [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965], p. 60). Harold Bloom cite
s J. H. van den Berg as arguing that the Romantic discovery of childhood also created adolescence as a bridge between child and adult (“The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in The Ringers in the Tower [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971] , p. 32). 3. Albert O. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 2223. 4. For discussions of the role of memory in “Tintern Abbey,” see, among many others, Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (rev. ed.; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 131140, who discusses memory’s redemptive function; Stuart M. Sperry, “From `Tintern Abbey’ to the `Intimations Ode’: Wordsworth and the Function of Memory,” Wordsworth Circle 1 (1970): 4049, who notes that memory helps Wordsworth “reexperience the past as a vital and constitutive element within present awareness” (p. 41) and that it has the power to help constitute identity by “fus[ing] past and present into a larger continuity, experienced as a kind of similitude-in-dissimilitude persisting through time” (p. 42), observations equally apposite to Austen’s scene; and Marshall Brown, “Romanticism and the Enlightenment,” who notes that the poem charts a movement from youthful empiricism to the halfcreation of memory and imagination (pp. 4041). For the difference between Wordsworth’s conception of memory and that of Rousseau, see Sabin, English Romanticism, pp. 78102. For the difference between Wordsworth’s conception and that of Johnson, see chapter 2 of this study. 5. The principle is especially obvious in the “Poems on the Naming of Places,” which as Jonathan Bate argues, “have a profound doubleness: they register loss—the moment recorded in the poem … is irredeemably past—but they simultaneously serve as acts of recovery” (Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition [London: Routledge, 1991], p. 93). The idea, Bate continues, may be generalized; for Wordsworth, every poem he writes is “gained out of the loss of a person, a moment, a feeling.” Bate is draw-180

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  ing here on Geoffrey Hartman’s essay on Wordsworth and the inscription, where Hartman argues that the poet characteristically reads landscape itself as if it were a monument or a grave, so that “[a] secondary consciousness of death and change associates itself with the very act of writing” (“Wordsworth, Inscription, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, p. 401). For the idea of the poem in Wordsworth as a replacement for or final location of what has been lost, see also David Simpson, Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 41, and Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 178. 6. Woodring argues that Wordsworth mentions the Abbey in the title because it was a standard subject of both the picturesque and the sublime, both of which the poem seeks to redo (“The New Sublimity of Tintern Abbey,” in The Evidence of the Imagination, ed. D. H. Reiman et al. [New York: New York University Press, 1978], pp. 89ff.). Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment, sees the poem as moving from picturesque scenepainting to the creation and contemplation of an inner or internalized landscape of memory (p. 110). 7. Paul H. Fry notes “Fanny Price’s Cowperian love of the Picturesque” (“Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Emma,” in Emma, ed. David Monaghan [Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992], p. 176). For discussions of the picturesque in Jane Austen’s novels in general and Mansfield Park in particular, see Hunt, “Picturesque,” and Jill Heydt-Stevenson, “Liberty, Connection, and Tyranny: The Novels of Jane Austen and the Aesthetic Movement of the Picturesque,” in Lessons of Romanticism, pp. 261279. 8. William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, etc., Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (2nd ed.; London, 1789), p. 47. Emphasis in the original. 9. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” Persuasion, p. 33. 10. See Brown, who notes similarly that “[i]n the opening of Mansfield Park, the voice speaking is that of the neighborhood itself, and the irony is the kind of smirking irony the neighborhood enjoys” (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 83). 11. Letters, p. 203 (4 Feb. 1813). 12. See Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, and Margaret Kirkham, “Feminist Irony and the Priceless Heroine of Mansfield Park,” in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, pp. 117133. 13. I owe this insight to a former undergraduate of mine, Caroline Simons. 14. For a discussion of the novel’s use of litotes along different lines, as a mode of narratorial humor, see Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and NineteenthCentury British Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 103104. 15. As pointed out by Maija Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 7. 16. As Terry Eagleton says, “Samuel Richardson must have known that the saintly Clarissa was a bore, just as the creator of Emma Woodhouse must have seen that the virtuous Fanny Price was hardly a bundle of fun; but both Austen and Richardson are challenging us to imagine how virtue, in such predatory social circumstances, could ever be anything else” (Figures of Dissent [London: Verso, 2003], p. 21). 17. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: 17871814, pp. 118ff. 18. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: 17871814, p. 143.

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  19. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey ([no city]: HarperCollins, 1962), p. 20. For Freud’s principal discussion of the fetish as a perversion of the sexual instinct, see “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 214219. 20. Quoted from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 43 n. 1. The passage is from scene 7; the translation is by Bayard Taylor. 21. According to Neil McKendrick, “[T]he first of the world’s consumer societies had unmistakably emerged [in England] by 1800” (“The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], p. 13). In his analysis, “the later eighteenth century saw such a convulsion of getting and spending, such an eruption of new prosperity, and such an explosion of new production and marketing techniques, that a greater proportion of the population than in any previous society in human history was able to enjoy the pleasures of buying consumer goods. They bought not only necessities, but decencies, and even luxuries” (p. 9). The imaginative and affective dimension of this revolution can be encapsulated in a single word: fashion. According to McKendrick, “[f]ashion in hats and hair styles, dresses and shoes and wigs and such like, arguably reached even greater extremes than ever before and certainly changed more rapidly and influenced a greater proportion of society” (p. 11). See also Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 16501850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), especially pp. 116, 6385, and 208227. 22. One may cite her long descriptions, to her sister Cassandra, of the latest in ladies fashions, the fun she repeatedly pokes at women’s obsession with those fashions in Northanger Abbey, Robert Ferrars’s deliberations over the purchase of a toothpick case, Emma and Harriet’s shopping trip to Ford’s, and so forth. 23. David Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 2030. The phrase is from Godwin (quoted in Fetishism and Imagination, p. 27). For this definition of the fetish, see p. xiii. Marx also employs the term “fetish” in his theory of commodity fetishism, but while the phrase suggests the kind of phenomenon in question here, it refers to the more general tendency within the bourgeois economy to regard all commodities as possessing value in themselves rather than as deriving their (exchange) value from the human labor that went into their production. For Marx, commodities are fetishized regardless of the psychic energy invested in them simply by virtue of being treated as autonomous agents capable of entering into relations of exchange with one another. (See The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: Norton, 1978], pp. 319329 [Capital, part I, chapter I, section 4].) 24. Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 41. The complementary risk is a “complete loss of all object-focus, and consequently of all selfidentity, in a p
antheistic oneness wherein there is no function for consciousness” (p. 41). 25. Similarly, Fry speaks of the “epitaphic moment” as widely diffused in Wordsworth, the distinction between epitaph and elegy being, as Fry develops it, that the former keeps up the appearance that the past—lying right before our eyes, written upon—remains necessarily present (A Defense of Poetry, p. 163).

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  26. Persuasion also features a fetish in the form of Captain Benwick’s picture. Austen clearly continued to find the phenomenon interesting, but in the later two novels it becomes peripheral to her main concerns. 27. Wiltshire discusses Fanny’s use of the cross and chain as a safeguard against the act of appropriation that is “coming out” (Jane Austen and the Body, pp. 98100). 28. Claudia L. Johnson also discusses this idealization in Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 115116. 29. Daniel Cottom also discusses what he calls “supplantments” of one person by another, though he goes considerably farther than I do both in seeing them as significantly present in all of Austen’s novels and in concluding that Austen “completely transfers desire from the realm of individual expression and spontaneous affinity … to a realm where it is little more than the intersection … of a great host of vagrant attachments and supplantments,” becoming the product of social forces in a process “destructive of individual identity and of individual expression” (The Civilized Imagination [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985], p. 105). So too, Brownstein sees Sense and Sensibility as containing “[t]he suggestion that people may be substituted for one another” (“Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,” p. 47). But for the difference between Marianne’s “acceptance” of Colonel Brandon and Edmund’s of Fanny, see below. 30. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: 17871814, p. 160. The two poems Hartman has in mind are undoubtedly “The Two April Mornings” and “The Fountain.” In the first, Matthew recalls standing by his daughter’s grave and turning to see “A blooming Girl … so very fair,” but, he says, “I looked at her, and looked again: / And did not wish her mine!” (ll. 4356). In the second, the poet himself is refused: ” `And, Matthew, for thy children dead / I’ll be a son to thee!’ At this he grasped my hand, and said, `Alas! that cannot be’ ” (ll. 6164). For a similar discussion of “The Two April Mornings,” see Richard E. Matlak, “The Men in Wordsworth’s Life,” Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 391397. 31. Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 4951. 32. For a related comment on this scene, see Misty G. Anderson, ” `The Different Sorts of Friendship’: Desire in Mansfield Park,” in Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, p. 172. 33. For analyses of this relationship, see Anderson, ” `The Different Sorts of Friendship,’ ” pp. 167183, and Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 246274. Also relevant are discussions of homoerotic impulses in Austen’s fiction, including Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”; Haggerty, Unnatural Affections; and Terry Castle, “Sister-Sister,” London Review of Books 3 Aug., 1995, pp. 36. 34. For the most thorough discussion of incestuous energies in Austen’s work, see Glenda A. Hudson, Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1992). For discussions that focus on Mansfield Park, see Johanna H. Smith, ” `My Only Sister Now’: Incest in Mansfield Park,” Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 115, and Kirkham, “Feminist Irony,” pp. 128129. For the displacement of incestuous feelings onto Edmund, see also R. F. Brissenden, “Mansfield Park: Freedom and the Family,” in Bicentenary Essays, p. 166, and Anderson, ” `The Different Sorts of Friendship,’ ” pp. 170171.